This rain sensor is what I have always been looking for
Posted: Tue 17 Jul 2012 1:20 pm
I have always been frustrated by seeing rain but having no trips from the tipping bucket, first from my Oregon WM918 and then from a WMR928NX. In particular I knew that a short shower on a warm day would partially fill the bucket, and then evaporate before the next contribution, leading to missed tips and under reporting.
The Hydreon never misses a drop, and whilst you can argue about linearity and repeatability, its performance when the rain starts and stops is the key for me. I have it set as tipping bucket with 0.01 mm bucket, and looking at the debug log it is great to see the odd bucket tip over the space of an hour adding up to something that eventually registers (ie more than 0.1mm), whilst the station tipping bucket remains silent for days - although not so much of that recently. On the subject of missed RG11 tips, I'm setting up a Delphi program to read the RS232 out (might even be able to route it to a second serial port in addition to the Cumulus input), I think there may be an absolute tip count in there, but need a description of all the registers from Hydreon.
Steve, when you are happy with the performance, I presume you will provide the same full set of webtags for the RG11 as you give for the weatherstation sensor. Can you provide an option to send the new sensor readings to Weather Underground, etc instead of the station rain readings? Also (I'm greedy) would it be possible to set the <#IsRaining> tag for tipping bucket RG11s, say if there was a bucket tip in the last 5 minutes? or better still allow the setting of a rain amount and a time so that we can decide what constitutes rain.
Really impressed with Cumulus, it keeps getting better and better. I'm glad I switched from FreeWX.
The Hydreon never misses a drop, and whilst you can argue about linearity and repeatability, its performance when the rain starts and stops is the key for me. I have it set as tipping bucket with 0.01 mm bucket, and looking at the debug log it is great to see the odd bucket tip over the space of an hour adding up to something that eventually registers (ie more than 0.1mm), whilst the station tipping bucket remains silent for days - although not so much of that recently. On the subject of missed RG11 tips, I'm setting up a Delphi program to read the RS232 out (might even be able to route it to a second serial port in addition to the Cumulus input), I think there may be an absolute tip count in there, but need a description of all the registers from Hydreon.
Steve, when you are happy with the performance, I presume you will provide the same full set of webtags for the RG11 as you give for the weatherstation sensor. Can you provide an option to send the new sensor readings to Weather Underground, etc instead of the station rain readings? Also (I'm greedy) would it be possible to set the <#IsRaining> tag for tipping bucket RG11s, say if there was a bucket tip in the last 5 minutes? or better still allow the setting of a rain amount and a time so that we can decide what constitutes rain.
Really impressed with Cumulus, it keeps getting better and better. I'm glad I switched from FreeWX.